Science in everyday life

Category archives for Science in everyday life

Owing to the fact that children are vectors of disease, three out of four members of the Free-Ride household have been feverish, achy, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy for the past few days. (It’s not clear yet whether the progression of this bug will include other dwarves.) Since I’m still kind of dopey, in lieu of…

The 12th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, will be taking place February 13-16, 2009. This is a lovely (and long-running) bit of citizen science that aims to compile a continent-wide snapshot of bird populations during a few days in February before the spring…

Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children’s toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the…

Counter Culture Coffee generously invited us to join us for their regular Friday morning cupping at their Durham, North Carolina headquarters. Here are the dimensions on which the coffees are evaluated in the cupping:

Around these parts, folks sometimes get het up about issues like scientific literacy (or lack thereof) in the general public, public interest (or lack thereof) in matters scientific, and whether scientists have the chops to communicate information clearly to non-scientists. It’s worth remembering that a large group of non-scientists are kids, and that they are…

For years, you’ve heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey — or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy. But according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the…

Earlier this week, I cooked up about a pound of the bush beans from our garden. There was a mix of yellow, green, and purple beans (although, as expected, steaming transformed the purple beans to a dark green color). I dressed the cooked beans as usual and served them with dinner. As I was clearing…

Given that today is Mole Day, it seemed only fair to follow up on our earlier experimentation with avocados. You may recall that, in discussing our efforts to dissolve avocados, we said: One further experiment we’ve decided to try at some future point is to investigate whether we can make mayonnaise substituting mashed avocado for…